End of an era

Nancy Reagan’s Death Highlights Trump’s Greatest Weakness

The last time I was in close proximity to Nancy Reagan was in 2011, when Marco Rubio, as it happens, was visiting the Reagan Library to deliver a speech. Rubio escorted Reagan into the room, arm in arm, and, while they walked, Reagan, slow and unsteady on her feet, stumbled and nearly fell to the ground before Rubio could catch her by the arm. It was upsetting to see this happen, and I hope she was not too badly hurt. In any case, it speaks to Reagan’s grit that she had eschewed a wheelchair and put forth the exertion of showing up for the speech of someone whom many Republicans at the time saw as promising. Just about everyone will agree that Nancy Reagan was a person of quiet dignity and fortitude. (As for Rubio, he made a speech offering a fairly candid set of thoughts, for which I gave him credit in an article at the time—momentarily forgetting that what politicians say is only a rough indicator of what they think, even less of what they do, and, in Rubio’s case, barely any guide at all. But that’s another article, perhaps for March 16.)

The sad news of Nancy Reagan’s death at age 94 marks yet another ending of the Ronald Reagan Era. We easily forget that Reagan’s inauguration is about as temporally distant today as John F. Kennedy’s inauguration was from that of Bill Clinton. I’ve sometimes heard people speculating about what Nancy Reagan might think of issues X, Y, or Z—she supported stem-cell research, for example, when most Republican leaders were aligned against it—which of course was a way of asking what Ronald Reagan would have thought of issues X, Y, or Z. But what’s remarkable is how hard it would be to say. The world has changed so much.

It’s not that the issues themselves have changed. We are still fighting about abortion, gun control, the appropriate degree of separation between church and state, illegal immigration, tax policy, crime, and civil-rights remedies. You can open a newspaper from 1982 and be surprised to see how little the arguments have evolved since then.

Still, there can be continuity on issues yet a shift in the big picture. The primary question of Ronald Reagan’s era was how vigorously we needed to keep prosecuting the Cold War. If your answer was “very vigorously,” then you were likely to be part of a large Republican coalition. Fierce resistance to Communism was the bonding glue, and it was strengthened by a widespread resistance to liberal-establishment policies on crime, welfare, and taxation, among other things. This allowed people like Pat Buchanan and Norman Podhoretz to share the same tent without too much friction. Even people inclined to isolationism believed that the more you withdrew from the world, the more Moscow expanded its reach.

But it was under Nancy’s husband that the Cold War effectively ended. And, suddenly, once the big foreign-policy question of the age had evaporated, conservatives split. (It’s no surprise that Buchanan’s first insurgency arose in 1992.) The new question was about what role America should play in the world henceforth—whether we should use our reprieve to play a much-reduced role on the world stage or instead double down on a lot of stuff we were doing during the Cold War. The mainstream wings of both parties came out in favor of the internationalist view: expand trade, expand NATO, expand immigration, and commit to intervention for either humanitarian reasons (liberal hawks) or for the sake of retaining superpower status (conservative hawks). But a meaningful minority on both sides—a less intellectually esteemed one, albeit—said much of what Donald Trump is saying today: we’re getting killed on trade, we don’t need to have troops stationed everywhere, and immigration policy is a disaster for the working class.

We don’t really know what President Reagan would have had to say about these things. If you pull out statements from his final few years of lucidity, ones already marked by serious cognitive decline, you’ll find something to bolster your case, either way. But even if he’d been clear on the vision for America’s role in the post–Cold War world, we still wouldn’t be able to deduce too much from it. We’ve had more than two decades of additional data coming in, and many people have changed their minds, becoming either less inclined to globalism or more so.

It feels vulgar to speculate about the political impact of Nancy Reagan’s death, but any major news that unfolds during a heated primary contest must wind up affecting the standing of the various candidates. My guess is that if her passing has any effect, it is to hurt Trump, especially after a worsening streak in his debates that culminated in the Hindenburg-meets-Exxon-Valdez performance he managed last week. An anti-Trump speech by Mitt Romney helps Trump, because it underscores how much his campaign is centered on overthrowing a blinkered establishment that was too arrogant to listen respectfully to the concerns of Americans being left behind. But the death of Reagan reminds us that Trump’s movement is led by a personality so contrary to what we expect from a head of state that even his fiercest supporters must feel serious twinges of doubt. Asked in the pages of this publication what her husband considered to be his greatest accomplishment, Nancy Reagan told Vanity Fair special correspondent Bob Colacello, “He wouldn’t think in those terms—what my greatest accomplishment was.” Huh. Next you’re gonna tell us Reagan didn’t go from rally to rally boasting about his poll numbers or large hands.

To look back at Nancy Reagan’s life is to be reminded of how much the qualities that she admired in her husband are absent in the current Republican front-runner. While many Republicans oppose Trump merely for his policy positions, many others seem to oppose him because his lack of respectability threatens their own respectability.

To be sure, the things that matter when it comes to social standing are sometimes superficial in comparison to the things that ought to matter—how you dress or talk versus whether you support carpet bombing countries in the Middle East—but social standing is still crucial to winning elections. People of high status must be willing to be associated with you. It’s quite possible to imagine Nancy Reagan coming to terms with Trump’s policy positions; it’s almost impossible to imagine her coming to terms with his character. She was too dignified for that. And that inevitably causes others to ask, “Then what am I?”